My blog turned 5!?

#+DRAFT

It just occurred to me that only a few days ago, this blog turned 5! The first post was made on 6th of September 2015. This first post was very useless, but stated the purpose of the blog quite nicely: things which are longer than a tweet but not worth a separate page. I think this is still quite true.

I'd like to list a few of my favourite posts during these five years, since it has been quite an adventure. Most of the posts in the first three months were hand drawn "Monthly Review" posts. They're quite cute in my opinion, but certainly not my favourite post. The list below is only my favourite posts. :-)

• <2016-09-17 Sat 00:22> Cats are stupid - Sure the title was a bit mean. They have grown on me a lot and they are very cute and well behaved these days.

• <2017-06-14 Wed 23:10> Fun with RL02 Drives - We didn't get them working but I had a lot of fun playing with them with bnl. There are several follow up posts about the RL02 drives, still not working, but gradually got closer. I'll hopefully try again at some point.

• <2017-07-18 Tue 16:47> UoN Computer Science turns 30 - This was such a happy day. Spending time with friends, colleagues and graduands (and their parents), talking about and playing with old computers. Some really nice photos too :-)

• <2017-10-31 Tue 20:23> More Debugging of the PDP-11 H7861 PSU (I fixed it!) - This post is quite short but includes a YouTube video where I described the problem. I like this post because it was the first time I understood the basic ideas behind switch mode power supplies, to the point that I was able to isolate and fix the problem quite quickly.

• <2019-07-05 Fri 18:22> PhD Viva - The PhD viva was a very difficult and perhaps slightly traumatic experience. I passed with minor corrections, which is generally as good as you can get, unless your examiners didn't read your thesis. I think the most important point of this post was to remind people (and myself) to take care of your mental health. It's hard not to become a hermit when you are so focused on a topic, and when something bad happens, you need to deal with it correctly or it will likely cause problems later on.
• <2020-05-17 Sun 11:55> 12AX7 Pre-amp build - What's not to like! I am really happy with the end result with this amplifier build. I think it looks great, and it sounds pretty good too.

• <2020-09-14 Mon 19:36> DEC VAX 4000-300 up and running - The post just before this one. I feel quite sad about this machine. I am insanely happy that I managed to get it into a kind of working state but I wish I could tell bnl about it. I know he would be very excited about it!

Related posts:

• Standing Desks and Other Office Related Stuff (oh, and I got a new bike)
• Graduation No. 2
• A nice "Personal Day"
• I'm Dill, the dog.
• Social Anxiety and Phobia

Tags: personal